Back Issues: Moon Missions

Last week, President Obama unveiled his new budget, which calls for, among other things, huge changes to NASA’s space program, including the elimination of manned moon missions. For some this is a poignant moment—especially given that last year marked the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Even for those of us born after the first moon landing, on July 20, 1969, it ranks high in our collective national memory. In the issue of July 26, 1969, The New Yorker devoted its entire Talk of the Town section to the landing, with stories about people’s reactions throughout the city. In his Comment for that issue, E. B. White wrote about the significance of man’s first visit to the moon:

The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky.

From 1969 to 1972, Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., wrote a series of articles in the magazine about the first manned mission and the later Apollo missions. In one of the first pieces he wrote after the Apollo 11 landing, Cooper described Neil Armstrong’s concern about coming up with the perfect first words upon landing:

[Astronaut Don] Lind says that Armstrong must have thought up his first words on the moon—“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”—sometime during the flight, for when Lind saw him shortly before liftoff he was still worrying about coming up with the right phrase. Armstrong had read a recent magazine article quoting such well-known opening lines as Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” and felt that he had been put on the spot. “He must have worried about it all the way to the moon,” Lind said. As for Aldrin, when he came out of the LM he said that he was making sure not to shut the door behind him. “A good thought,” Armstrong commented ironically from the surface—for, curiously, there is no handle to open the hatch from the outside.

Years later, in a 1991 Comment marking the twenty-second anniversary of the landing, Thomas Hackett summed up the cultural meaning of the first mission, describing it as a “first kiss” that could never be repeated:

The reasons we go into space are as muddled now as everything else. But the first moon landing still stands out as a rare moment of clarity. When the Apollo 11 rocket blasted off, its objectives were plain and simple. The moon was a visible target, one commiserate with everyone’s dreams, and, for once, our aims were true.

I like to think that putting a man on the moon was a kind of blessing we conferred on ourselves. So much of what had been on everybody’s mind suddenly seemed incidental: worries evaporated, and people lived in a momentary state of grace. For centuries, mankind had wondered about the moon and projected onto it all sorts of mystical powers to affect us, and thinking about the day we might finally get there had kept us emotionally on our toes, like an intense infatuation. After the first landing, something was gone forever: that first kiss could never be repeated. For a few hours, though, mankind swooned.

The entire articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.